Scipio Africanus - Epic Roman Music

Lyrics by Sillius Italicus, composition, instruments & vocals by Farya Faraji. The Epic Roman Music series presents the epic repertoire of Ancient Roman poetry, narrative epics and stories through the usage of their instruments and modes. The series' goal is to reshape public perceptions of how Ancient Rome is imagined sonically, moving toward a more accurate representation which uses their instrumentation and repertoire of modes. While I also maintain a separate series dedicated to historically informed approximations of Roman music, the Epic Roman Series approaches the question through an ethnomusicological methodology. The living traditions of the modern Balkans preserve sound worlds closer to what we can plausibly imagine for ancient Roman music than the cinematic conventions of film soundtracks. Thus, we can explore the unavoidable gaps in our limited knowledge of Roman music through living musical practices preserved in the Balkans. This allows the attested sounds of their instruments and modal languages to be heard in a culturally realistic way, while remaining distinct from modern cinematic soundscapes. The lyrics sung here are an excerpt from the Punica, an epic poem written in the 2nd century A.D by Sillius Italicus, who recounts the rivalry between Scipio Africanus and his nemesis Hannibal, with this scene taking place during the climactic battle of Zama. The poem was lost for centuries, until it was rediscovered in the 15th century Poggio Bracciolini, an Italian Renaissance scholar. The composition uses period instrumentation, namely a phorminx constructed for me by the wonderful folks at Luthieros, a branch of the Seikilos Museum of Ancient Music of Thessaloniki. I played the lyre according to the theories of the likes of Prof. Stefan Hagel, who believe the strummed plectrum way of playing the lyre involved dichordal harmony, which in this case, I kept to a very conservative estimate of accompanying all the melodie's notes with its perfect fifth, though combinations may well have been more complex, as I demonstrate in some of my historically informed approximations of Roman music. The singing maintains the dactylic hexametre of the poem, which is a metric structure that provides this specific scansion and verbal rhythm heard here. In Greco-Roman Antiquity, the dactylic hexametre was the "epic" poetic metre, associated with epic poetry since the days of Homer. Lyrics available in the pinned comment.